From time to time I am rewarded for some perceived diligence at work and receive some shopping vouchers. Diligence is a relative term and I see myself as notable only in comparison with the average, very average, standard set by my peers.
These vouchers have become quite welcome in recent years. One can either have a little treat or spend them on something that would otherwise have cost money but not all of our struggling retail outlets accept them. Since the biography of Elizabeth Jennings was due to cost money in September and Waterstones will take the vouchers, it seemed sensible to order it from them and forego any parsimonious consideration of Amazonian discounting. The advantages of online ordering were not advertised by the inability of their website to take payment by voucher. It insisted on having my credit card details.
It was at this stage that I decided to be henceforth known as Lupin.
Going into the city centre is such an arduous undertaking in this day and age. All it has is shops and they are of little interest. But I made a detour from my itinerary yesterday, accommodated by a day ticket on the omnibus which allows me to spend all day using the services of First should I see fit. And I went into Waterstones to present my credentials and credit notes.
The helpful assistant paused some way through the process of placing the order to apologize for all the rigmarole involved. I said don't worry about it, you ought to see what it's like where I work. The author's name is Greene with an 'e', mine is Green without. And they'll email me when it's in, which is all fine.
Until one gets home to find the TLS lying so self-satisfied at its own erudition in the porch and in it is mention of Don Paterson's The Poem: Lyric, Sign and Metre 752 pages of essential reading by the great man whose every utterance on such subjects needs reading as a matter of urgency and relish. Why didn't I know about that. It was published in May. I'm slipping.
Exploring the various avenues of acquiring that, and fretting that I made a technical error only an hour or so earlier, I decide the best option is to get Amazon to leave it behind the wheelie bin next week. But now the monster online retailer reckons it'll be here tomorrow, so I'll be in. You can't argue with that.
At the same time, trying to avoid all extraneous delivery charges, one sometimes has to just fling all caution to the restless wind and just pay up. It's been a long time I've been waiting to see the DVD of Un Coeur en Hiver for next to nothing. But I've now seen all my other favourite films - mostly French and from that period - several times and I'd like to see that one again.
World Cup fever didn't last long. I was completely over it by the morning after. Emmanuelle Beart fever hasn't yet abated in twenty-five years.
So, Hideo Yokoyama's Six Four, which I've sat passively through 200 pages of, amazed at the number of words that can be made out of a 'police procedural' - Proust, Tolstoy and Thomas Hardy would all have been impressed if they had lived long enough- is going to struggle to stay in the game. The Don's book is just as weighty and likely to be more compelling. It is astonishing that 752 pages need to be read before one is in a position to read the 24 short lines of Tamer and Hawk but there we go, needs must. Maybe one day poetry will escape back out of the universities.
The main benefit, though, is not the reading, not the books themselves or even the complexities one can make out of the process of acquiring them. It is writing about the minor details of acquiring them in the current era. That is as postmodern as it gets. Where's Roland Barthes when you need him.
David Green
- David Green (Books) is the imprint under which I published booklets of my own poems. The original allocation of ISBN numbers is used up now, though. The 'Collected Poems' are now available as a pdf. The website is now what it has become, often more about music than books and not so often about poems. It will be about whatever suggests itself.
